Aggregators
Aggregators Essay NO. 5 By: Mohammad Mousavi Date : 1392-02-01 Section heading Aggregator refers to a web site or computer software that aggregates a specific type of information from multiple online sources: *Data aggregator, an organization involved in compiling information from detailed databases on individuals and selling that information to others *News aggregator, a computer software or website that aggregates news from other news sources *Poll aggregator, a website that aggregates polling data for upcoming elections *Review aggregator, a website that aggregates reviews of movies or other products or services *Search aggregator, software that runs on a user's computer and fetches, filters, and organizes a specific search from various search engines *Social network aggregation, the collection of content from multiple social network services *Video aggregator, a website that collects and organizes online video sources Section heading Function Visiting many separate websites frequently to find out if content on the site has been updated can take a long time. Aggregation technology helps to consolidate many websites into one page that can show the new or updated information from many sites. Aggregators reduce the time and effort needed to regularly check websites for updates, creating a unique information space or personal newspaper. Once subscribed to a feed, an aggregator is able to check for new content at user-determined intervals and retrieve the update. The content is sometimes described as being pulled to the subscriber, as opposed to pushed with email or IM. Unlike recipients of some pushed information, the aggregator user can easily unsubscribe from a feed. Aggregation features are frequently built into web portal sites, in the web browsers themselves, in email applications or in application software designed specifically for reading feeds. The aggregator provides a consolidated view of the content in one browser display or desktop application. Aggregators with podcasting capabilities can automatically download media files, such as MP3 recordings. In some cases, these can be automatically loaded onto portable media players (like iPods) when they are connected to the end-user's computer. By 2011, so-called RSS-narrators appeared, which aggregated text-only news feeds, and converted them into audio recordings for offline listening. The syndicated content an aggregator will retrieve and interpret is usually supplied in the form of RSS or other XML-formatted data, such as RDF/XML or Atom. Types of aggregation The variety of software applications and components that are available to collect, format, translate, and republish XML feeds is a testament to the flexibility of the format and has shown the usefulness of presentation-independent data. News aggregation websites Examples of this sort of website are the Drudge Report and the Huffington Post.,1 Google News, DecaPost and World News (WN) Network,2 where aggregation is entirely automatic, using algorithms which carry out contextual analysis and group similar stories together, and JockSpin, which aggregates and categorizes most headlines automatically, but supplements with manually curated headlines as well as its own articles.3 News aggregation websites started with sites like the Drudge Report, NewsNow, Andrew Breitbart and the Huffington Post, where content was still entered by humans. Newer sites, such as FeedSavvy.com, Google News, E! Science News, and News Clusters on the other hand, are based on algorithms filling the content from a range of either automatically selected or manually added sources. Web-based feed readers Web-based feeds readers allow users to find a web feed on the internet and add it to their feed reader. Online feed readers include Bloglines, Feedly, Google Reader (discontinuing July 1, 20134), My Yahoo!, NewsBlur56 and Netvibes. These are meant for personal use and are hosted on remote servers. Because the application is available via the web, it can be accessed anywhere by a user with an internet connection. More advanced methods of aggregating feeds are provided via Ajax coding techniques and XML components called web widgets. Ranging from full-fledged applications to small fragments of source code that can be integrated into larger programs, they allow users to aggregate OPML files, email services, documents, or feeds into one interface. Many customizable homepage and portal implementations provide such functionality. In addition to aggregator services mainly for individual use, there are web applications that can be used to aggregate several blogs into one. One such variety—called planet sites—are used by online communities to aggregate community blogs in a centralized location. They are named after the Planet aggregator, a server application designed for this purpose. Feed reader applications Feed aggregation clients are applications installed on a PC, smartphone or tablet computer, designed to collect web feed subscriptions and group them together using a user-friendly interface. The graphical user interface of such applications often closely resembles that of popular e-mail clients, using a three-panel composition in which subscriptions are grouped in a frame on the left, and individual entries are browsed, selected, and read in frames on the right. Software aggregators can also take the form of news tickers which scroll feeds like ticker tape, alerters that display updates in windows as they are refreshed, web browser macro tools or as smaller components (sometimes called plugins or extensions), which can integrate feeds into the operating system or software applications such as a web browser. Clients applications include Mozilla Firefox, Microsoft Office Outlook, iTunes, FeedDemon and many others. Media aggregators Media aggregators are sometimes referred to as podcatchers due to the popularity of the term podcast used to refer to a web feed containing audio or video. Media aggregators are client software or web-based applications which maintain subscriptions to feeds that contain audio or video media enclosures. They can be used to automatically download media, playback the media within the application interface, or synchronize media content with a portable media player. Broadcatching Several BitTorrent client software applications have added the ability to broadcatch torrents of distributed multimedia through the aggregation of web feeds. Feed filtering One of the problems with news aggregators is that the volume of articles can sometimes be overwhelming, especially when the user has many web feed subscriptions. As a solution, many feed readers allow users to tag each feed with one or more keywords which can be used to sort and filter the available articles into easily navigable categories. Another option is to import the user's Attention Profile to filter items based on their relevance to the user's interests. Based on the theory that you can't have too much of a good thing, a new generation of Web aggregators is combining content or applications from many sources and service providers into single Web sites. These firms gather content or applications and market them to third-party Web sites. They differ from traditional aggregators, which collect information exclusively for their own sites. The new aggregators offer everything from consolidated consumer financial information to business applications from application service providers (ASP). They can be divided into two categories: displayers of information and resellers. Displayers collect and display specialty information from multiple sources. That information can include subjects such as skateboarding, crafts and women's sports. This is the traditional model embodied by Web sites such as Santa Clara, Calif.-based Yahoo Inc. Resellers have emerged as a type of aggregator. They collect content or applications and remarket them to Web sites operated by other firms. Depending on their focus, these aggregators market to consumer-oriented sites and to corporations that operate external Web sites for customers or intranet sites for employees. For instance, telecommunications equipment firm Nortel Networks Corp. in Brampton, Ontario, buys general news and new product announcement information for its intranet from iSyndicate Inc., an aggregator and reseller in San Francisco. "Aggregation is nothing new, but there are getting to be more Web aggregators all the time," says Kathleen Hall, an analyst at Giga Information Group Inc. in Cambridge, Mass. Aggregators are valuable, she says, because the broad array of content and applications they provide often helps keep visitors at a Web site longer and prompts them to return more often.